In the following essay, Olson suggests that A Midsummer Night's Dream was intended to serve as a guidebook for married aristocratic couples and, by extension, for a moral society.

The opinion that A Midsummer Night's Dream is largely a shimmering fabric of “moonlight, with a touch of moonshine”1 has become stock among students of Shakespeare. One rephrases habitual insights concerning gossamer and magic whenever one treats of the work. But there is more to the play than a dream. The efforts of historical scholars to place this comedy in the setting of its dramatic tradition, to see it as “sui generis, a ‘symbolical’ or masque-like play”2 suggest that we ought to revise our romantic preconceptions of its structure and theme. Elizabethan masques usually afforded pleasures more serious than those of...